CRAWFORD | Two peas in a podcast? Calipari, Pitino, air it out for upcoming 'Cal Cast'

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — If you don’t know Rick Pitino, you think he’s kidding when he says that he didn’t really know what a podcast was when John Calipari asked him recently to be a guest on his latest venture, the Cal Cast.

Pitino is a political junkie. He can talk to you about football. He’s read a great deal. He can go into depth on any number of subjects. But, as he told reporters on Tuesday, if you handed him a phone and asked him to find Courier-Journal beat writer Jeff Greer’s Twitter account, he couldn’t do it.

(And that, Greer answered, and I second his stance, is probably for the best.)

Anyway, after Pitino texted Calipari that he’d be happy to do his podcast, he went out to his executive assistant, Jordan Sucher, with a question.

“What actually is a podcast?” he asked. “Do you go on TV? Do I have to dress up for this? I had no idea. I’d heard it many, many times. But I didn’t know what it was.”

Do I have to dress up for this? For a podcast? Stop. That’s a clubhouse leader for line of the year. (Yeah, I know, the year is only three days old.)

Anyway, the two taped the podcast episode via telephone a couple of days ago. Calipari said they talked for about 45 minutes. He got the idea when the two were on a treadmill and talked at the Peach Jam a while back.

“Wouldn’t you have loved to have cameras on that?” Calipari asked reporters.

Now, we at least have microphones.

On his weekly radio show Monday night, Calipari told Tom Leach: “It was unbelievable. We were in studio, we started wrestling. I had him in a choke hold.”

It didn’t go as far as all that. Calipari said his own wife didn’t believe him when he told her. But it happened.

Reportedly, while Pitino was on the phone taping the podcast, Louisville sports information director Kenny Klein came up and wanted to ask the coach something and asked Sucher, “Who’s he talking to?” Sucher, the story goes, just said, “You don’t want to know.”

Pitino said the discussion was wide-ranging.

“We had a lot of fun doing it,” Pitino said. “We talked about people that we have crossed paths with that we’re very fond of throughout the years. We laughed a lot about it. It was going through history a little bit.”

I’m not going to steal any of the thunder of Calipari’s podcast, airs every Tuesday and is available via iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Play and all of the usual podcast platforms. But I was told that the discussion begins with an amusing interaction they had with each other about their most recent books.

What next? Trump on a podcast with Putin? Joe B. doing a show with Denny? Wait. That already happened. Those two were trendsetters.

Pitino said people shouldn’t be surprised.

“I would say John and I, our relationship, is just as good as Roy (Williams) and Mike (Krzyzewski),” Pitino said. “It’s very cordial. It’s very professional. The most important thing is we have respect for each other as coaches and we have respect for each other’s programs, knowing how good they are. You know, we’ve been through, John’s been through two programs where they’ve been our rivals. Not only has it been Duke-Carolina with (Krzyzewski and Williams), but we’ve also had Memphis, before we entered the Big East, the biggest rival Louisville had for years was Memphis. So it’s just a matter of schools, it’s not individuals, hard as that is for people to fathom. We don’t even recruit against each other that much, and that’s where there’s problems. It’s not usually on the court. Problems always happen in recruiting, because that’s really competitive. And we don’t really recruit against each other too much. . . . I have as good a relationship with him as any coach . . . in the ACC.”

I spoke with Pitino briefly after Tuesday’s news conference, and he echoed those sentiments.

“John is great at the marketing things he does,” Pitino said. “He has so many little things. I don’t know where he has the time. . . . But he clearly puts a lot of thought and work into it.”